He turned his head slowly, his golden eyes resting on her face. A chill went down her spine. Those eyes were soulless, ice-cold.
“You do not know the first thing about me, Alexandria. Nor have you taken the trouble to learn. Do not presume to fight me. You are a mere fledging, I one of the ancients of our people. You have no conception of the power I wield. I can make the earth move beneath your feet and the lightning crack above your head. I can call the fog and become invisible.” There was no boasting in his tone, just fact. Just black velvet. “I can do things you cannot imagine.”
Alexandria felt the permanent link he had forged between them, and she could feel his rage, black and terrible, seething below the surface. “What I did today, I did to myself,” she whispered.
He moved toward her, looming large, towering over her, an invincible figure, powerful beyond imagining. “You betrayed me. You betrayed Joshua. I told you what would happen if you went out into the sun. You pretended to yourself that you would see if I was telling the truth. But you already knew it was the truth. You took a chance on destroying yourself, leaving Joshua to strangers, to an uncertain future without protection.”
“You would protect him.”
“Without you, my existence is no more. We are linked, in life and death. If you choose death, you are choosing death for both of us.”
Her hands were trembling as she swept back her hair. “That can’t be.”
“You do not wish it to be,” he corrected her, and he took possession of her right arm. “But it is so. I do not lie to you, Alexandria. I have allowed you a certain amount of resistance, but only because this is all new to you.”
The gel he began smearing over her arm was cool and soothing. “You’re saying I don’t have a choice. That I’ve never had a choice,” she ventured.
“Your body and mine made the choice for us. Your soul is the other half of mine. My heart is your heart. Our minds reach for the reassurance and intimacy of the other. We are not complete when we are alone. We are two halves of the same whole. That is the truth, Alexandria, whether you like it or not.”
She swallowed hard, wanting to press her fingertips to her pounding forehead. “It isn’t true. It can’t be.” She denied it out loud because she didn’t want it to be true, because she would not believe in him and his nightmare world.
“Why do you think I can touch your burns as I do without causing you agony? I am blocking the pain for you. This treatment would be torture for you without me.”
“It isn’t true,” she repeated in a small whisper.
“I am angry enough with your stupidity to prove my words, cara. Do not argue with me. My body cries out for yours. Not with a mere human need, but with the need of the Carpathian male for its mate. I burn for you, night and day. My only relief is when I sleep the sleep of my people, unaware. Do not tempt me to prove my words, because there will be no going back.”
She hunched her shoulders, averted her face from him. Aidan could feel hot, seething rage swirling in him, mixing with the urgent demands of his body and the Carpathian male’s need to control. He bent closer to her, reckless now, not choosing his words or actions carefully as he so often tried to do. “You are unable to allow a human male to touch you. You feel revulsion, not pleasure, and you know it. I have been in your mind; I have seen your thoughts. You hunger only for me.”
The images he reflected back to her were her own. Hot, erotic things she had no real knowledge of. Things she found humiliating to have even thought of. Her kneeling at his feet, touching him, her mouth moving over him; his body atop hers, commanding hers, taking hers, hot and furiously. He knew, and he was taunting her with her own private fantasies of the two of them together.